The waves of remotely activated explosions that hit pagers and walkie-talkies carried by Hezbollah members in grocery stores, on the streets and at funerals this week were a disturbing and shocking sight.
Analysts have noted that Hezbollah may regroup and find ways to communicate after the attack, but the psychological impact is likely to be profound.
The blasts, widely blamed on Israel, whose involvement it has neither confirmed nor denied, killed at least 37 people, including two children, and wounded more than 3,000, and have deeply worried even Lebanese with no ties to Hezbollah.
The blasts affected workers at Hezbollah’s civilian facilities, including its health and media operations, as well as fighters, dealing a blow to the militant group’s operations outside the battlefield. It is not yet known how many civilians, not affiliated with Hezbollah, were injured.
The attacks also exposed weaknesses in the low-tech communications system the group had relied on to evade Israeli surveillance of its phones.
Retired Lebanese army general Elias Hanna described the attacks as “Pearl Harbor or Hezbollah’s 9/11.”
Mohanad Heij Ali, a Carnegie Middle East researcher who studies Hezbollah, said that because the bombings hit people in all of the group’s facilities, the attack was “like a sword in the stomach.” Hundreds of people were seriously injured, many of them losing eyes or hands.
“It will take time to heal and replace those who were attacked,” he said.
But Hajj Ali and other analysts believe the loss of troops is not a devastating blow. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has claimed the group has more than 100,000 fighters, meaning the attack, however tragic, will only eliminate a small percentage of its fighters, even if all the wounded and killed are combatants.
Qassim Kassir, a Lebanese Hezbollah analyst, said the blasts mainly hit the group’s civilian workers, not military and security officials, allowing it to limit the effects of its war effort.
Hezbollah, Lebanon’s most powerful armed force, has been exchanging attacks with the Israeli military on an almost daily basis since October 8, a day after a deadly Hamas-led attack in southern Israel, a major Israeli offensive and the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip.
Since then, hundreds of people have been killed in attacks in Lebanon and dozens in Israel, while tens of thousands have been displaced on both sides of the border. Hezbollah has said its attacks are backed by its ally Hamas and will stop if a ceasefire is implemented in Gaza.
Hezbollah continued to fire rockets across the border on Wednesday and Thursday after attacks on pagers and walkie-talkies, albeit at a slower pace than usual.
The impact on Hezbollah’s communications network is likely to be more damaging than the human casualties.
“Telecommunications are the lifeblood of military operations and communications,” said Naji Maloeb, a security expert and retired general in the Lebanese army. A delay in communication can lead to disaster, he added.
In a speech in February, Hezbollah leader Nasrallah warned his members not to carry phones that he said could be used to track them and monitor their communications.
But long before that, Hezbollah used pagers and its own private fiber-optic telephone network to evade communications surveillance.
The pagers that sounded Tuesday were a new model that the group had only recently begun using. It is possible that small amounts of explosives were placed in the devices at some stage of production or delivery and then detonated remotely.
Hanna said the group could rely more on its landline network, which Israel has repeatedly tried to use, or even lower-tech solutions such as handwritten letters.
“Maybe we should go back to human interaction, to the postman,” he said. “This is what really helps Yahya Sinwar (Hamas leader) avoid being attacked” in his hideout in Gaza.
Orna Mizrahi, a researcher at the National Security Institute in Tel Aviv and a former intelligence analyst for the Israeli military and the prime minister’s office, said the loss of the ability to communicate via pager was a “dramatic blow.”
He said the greatest damage suffered by Hezbollah was psychological damage.
“It is an insult to carry out such an operation and shows how exposed the organisation is to Israeli intelligence,” he said.
Amal Saad, a professor of politics and international relations at Cardiff University in Wales who researches Hezbollah, said the biggest impact of the attack was the “sickness and fear” it spread.
“It is not just a lack of security against the military,” he said. “The entire Hezbollah community will be very concerned because everything is now vulnerable to hacking and manipulation.”
Saad said the group is “now looking at a lot of things, not just pagers.”
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Associated Press writer Melanie Lidman in Jerusalem contributed to this report.
